My thoughts on The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies

I’ve just finished an eye-opening book, The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. The book argues that management consulting firms have weakened governments and corporations around the world. While many of the book’s points are compelling, the consultants I met during my internship at BCG Jakarta genuinely wanted to make things better.

The book describes how large consulting firms, especially the Big Three management consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, and Bain & Company) and the Big Four accounting firms (PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, and EY), have expanded their revenues at the expense of the self-reliance of their clients. In this blog post, I want to reflect on what I learned (and still remember) from reading it.

Keep ‘em dependent

When organizations repeatedly outsource core work to consultancies, they reduce their opportunity to learn by themselves and build internal capabilities. Over time, this can create institutions that struggle to function without external help. Consulting firms, understandably, have little incentive to fully transfer their knowledge if doing so reduces future demand for their services. The result can be a cycle of dependency: more outsourcing leads to weaker internal capacity, which in turn justifies more outsourcing.

Consultants can bring value quickly, indeed. This is especially useful when the contracting organization does not have the capacity to do the work itself at the time. However, the question remains: does the value created consistently outweigh the long-term cost, including the erosion of internal capability?

“Asal bapak senang”

This Indonesian phrase roughly means, “as long as the boss is happy.”

Sometimes, decision-makers already have a preferred solution in mind. What they need is not a new solution from the consultants, rather an external and “objective” justification for the one they want to implement. This often happens when the decision is difficult: mass layoffs, major restructuring, or bold strategic shifts. A recommendation from a reputable consultancy can make such decisions appear inevitable and data-driven. Moreover, if things go wrong, the consultancy can become a convenient scapegoat.

Conflicting interests

The book also highlights the risk of conflicts of interest when consulting firms serve both governments and private industries at the same time.

What happens if a consultancy advises a government on regulatory policy while also advising companies operating in that regulated industry? Even if no explicit wrongdoing occurs, the structural incentive problem is clear. As taxpayers, I believe we should at least question how such dual roles are managed and disclosed. (Note that most of the examples in the book come from the public sector.)

Conclusion

There were many more points discussed in the book, but I will keep it short here. One other thing I want to point out is how “consulting is concerned mainly with creating an impression of value,” and that consultants are “impression managers, who deliver images, impressions and rhetorical acts … to convince potential and existing clients of their legitimacy and ability to create value.”

However, to conclude, I have to say that I admire how consultants approach complex problems. Many of them are exceptionally capable. Yet capability alone is not enough. Consultants (like all people) should operate with clear principles that prioritize the broader public good, not only the profitability of their clients or their firms. This book strengthened my belief that technical brilliance must be matched with ethical responsibility.

Appendix: My opinion as someone who has been there

If you look at my work experience, you will see that I interned at BCG Jakarta in 2014. I do not dismiss the book’s arguments. However, I want to emphasize that the consultants I met were thoughtful, hardworking, and genuinely motivated to improve the contracting organizations they served.

I cannot speak for partners or firm-level strategic decisions. But at the individual level, I saw people who believed they were working for the greater good.